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New-age buyers-the kind who maybe started flying when Bill Clinton was still in the White House-arent so sanguine. If they drive a BMW or a Lexus, they actually expect things like competent customer service and airplanes that more or less perform as the manufacturers claim. But have the manufacturers sensed this and adjusted their marketing and sales hype accordingly? Mostly, they have, but they still try to slip by a fast one occasionally, which is what Colombia and Mooney are doing at the moment, in our view. In their sales material and Web sites, both are claiming to sell the fastest piston single-Columbia with its 400 and Mooney with its recently introduced Acclaim. Says Columbia on its Web site: “The Columbia 400 is faster than any other certified single-engine piston-powered aircraft on the planet, period.”
Like all such ad claims, these seem to have materialized out of the thin air the 400 and the Acclaim need to climb into to deliver the speed theyre selling. There’s no FAI certification, no Guinness Book of World Records certificate and not even so much as an asterisk explaining the details.